Color filter arrays are used in a variety of electronic devices, including portable devices, such as laptop computers, and non-portable devices, such as flat screen televisions. Color filter arrays can be used to filter light that is later captured by a sensing element, such as in a digital camera, or to provide color in a flat panel display. Color filter arrays are used in display technologies, such as liquid crystal display (LCD) and organic light emitting diode (OLED) display technologies.
Typically, a color filter array includes many pixels and each pixel includes a number of colored sub-pixels that are separated from one another by a narrow black matrix. Each sub-pixel is a single color, such as red, green, blue, white, cyan, yellow, magenta, or another suitable color. Light is passed through a sub-pixel to display the sub-pixel's color. A different amount of light is passed through different sub-pixels to provide a large number of colors.
Often, color filter arrays are manufactured using photolithography on glass. Photosensitive colored dyes are applied to a sheet of glass and selectively exposed or cured and washed off to create the narrow black matrix and the sub-pixels. However, this requires a large number of steps and is cost prohibitive.